Google Owns Mobile With AdWords Enhanced Campaigns

February 8, 2013

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There’s been a lot of buzz surrounding Google’s recent announcement of AdWords Enhanced Campaigns, which is essentially an easier way for advertisers to target users across all devices. To sum it up, Google saw that a ton of advertisers were spending most of their time and money on desktop based campaigns despite the growth in mobile search.

We know Google is all about solving problems, so you bet they came up with a solution.

The focus of enhanced campaigns is to increase mobile advertising adoption while increasing market share for Google as mobile use continues to grow. For this to happen, advertisers had to get on board. The result is the streamlining of campaign management tasks within AdWords.

Google has highlighted three key components within enhanced campaigns:

Simplified budgeting: Bid management can now target location, time of day, and device type within a single campaign.

Customized ad delivery based on how, where, and when a user searches: Ads will be shown across devices and will include sitelinks or extensions, saving the advertiser from going through the process of setting up campaigns for different device types, locations or times of day.

More comprehensive reporting through conversion types: Tracking multiple types of conversions, including calls from smartphones, app downloads, and in the future, possible offline attribution (somehow).

As always, there’s a catch. Remember the old, “Hey, we’re going to get rid of spam” thing that ended up becoming the Panda nightmare for SEOs? Well guess what? Here comes another strike.

This new simplification will come at a price. The price of control and transparency, which will be lost. Default bids will include both desktop/tablets with no available segmentation as previously allowed. The idea, according to Google, is that tablet performance is quite similar to desktops and laptops, so let’s make this easier. For advertisers who have honed their desktop and tablet campaigns and dialled in their efficiency, the CPCs associated with each will now shift to desktop CPCs and the tablet performance transparency will be lost.

Desktops and tablets will have a baseline bid and the mobile bid will be a multiplier of the desktop/tablet bid. It remains unclear what that multiplier should be at the present time, but as far as opting out of mobile, an advertiser can decrease their mobile bid which means the ads won’t show up on mobile. But still no mobile only campaigns. If you wanted to zero in on mobile, your base bid could be set low and the mobile bid could be jacked up.

Google is planning to roll out enhanced campaigns as an option over the next couple of weeks, with a full push across all campaigns in June. As you can tell, this AdWords change is significant and is certainly the biggest in the last 5 years. At least.

So, will this help small businesses get turned on to optimizing for mobile both on the advertising front as well as responsive design wise?

For more information also check out this resource page over at Google.